One Year Later

I have a student teacher this year.  I started working on my teaching philosophy before I knew he was going to be in classes with me, but having someone in my classroom - kind of feeling under the microscope - as well as being responsible for guiding his professional development has made me more aware of my own.  I'll probably talk about it some more in upcoming posts, as well.  For now...  It never ceases to amaze me at the difference a year makes.  This year I added or changed a couple of projects in each grade, but several of them I just reworked.  The experience of teaching them once and overcoming the obstacles I faced in each instance was a big advantage.

This is the second year I had my students create cardboard animal sculptures, inspired by Alexander Calder's circus as well as his stabiles.  I got a few great pieces last year, but the overall quality of the work this year was even better.

I think a big contribution to their success was the fact that I had the kids make a cardstock maquette of their sculpture this year before beginning their final project with cardboard.

I've been working on taking better pictures of their work since I got the "big gun" (my Canon EOS 60D).  I was pretty pleased with the quality of the images.

Last year I did a unit on fauvism with my sixth graders and had them use a grid to plot out a photo of themselves.  I used tempera paints because we have a TON of them for some reason, but decided this year to go for watercolors instead.

Overall I think the quality was similar to last year's batch, but using watercolor gave me the opportunity to teach them some of the techniques, such as washing and layering the colors.  These were a lot larger than last years, and some of them struggled to finish as a result.  I think if I do this project next year (and I may, because it really does help me in learning names), I'll scale the paintings back a bit.

These are some of the mosaics that we made this year.  The delivery of the content was a lot smoother, as was the planning stages.  I forgot how long it took to get them done, though, and as a result, I had a lot of students who were still trying to finish as I was putting in grades for the semester :-(

Finally, there were the stained glass windows.  My student teacher was really helpful in getting around and helping everyone, and they were overall of a much better quality compositionally than last year.  However, these students struggled much harder to cut the tissue paper the right sizes and glue it into the space without leaving gaps.  This seemed strange to me as when I did the ordering for this year I made sure to get plenty of tissue paper - it wasn't for lack of big pieces, which was a problem we ran into toward the end of this project last year.